Amazonia: Anthology as Cosmology

by Quinn Latimer (Editor), Kateryna Botanova (Editor)

Amazonia as a place, a subject, a point of view, and a socio-ecological world.

Anthology as Cosmology is devoted to Amazonia, its peoples, allies, and nonhuman spirits, and their myriad material and immaterial practices, from certain cosmopolitics and visual languages to past and present forms of resistance. In all their various lines (and circles) of ecological and epistemological thought, the artists, elders, writers, theorists, shamans, curators, poets, and activists whose ideas, images, and struggles compose this book, are concerned with Amazonia as both a place and a point of view. Through the weaving of voices, myths, ancestors, and territories, and all their radical subjectivities, we understand language in this anthology in an extended as testimony, textile, painting, river, forest, animal, ancestor, song, spirit, and sacred medicine. Anthology as Cosmology inquires into decolonial feminisms and Indigenous temporalities, externalized memory and erasure, sacred plants in the shadow of pandemic corporate-state extractivism and systemic violence, the activist possibilities of the mythic imagination, and the common visual matrices of the Amazonian universe. The book also weighs the Western imaginary of the Amazon, both its colonial roots in racial capitalism and its corporate, technological, paternalistic present. Centered, however, is Amazonia itself, in all its many and numinous worlds and languages—visual, oral, botanical, ancestral, cosmological—by which it becomes narrated, passed on, and then narrated again.

Contributors
Maria Thereza Alves, Christian Bendayan, Rita Carelli, Felipe Castelblanco, Carolina Caycedo, Hernando Chindoy Chindoy, Tiffany Higgins, Márcia Wayna Kambeba, knowbotique, Davi Kopenawa, Ailton Krenak, Renata Machado, Maurício Meirelles, Harry Pinedo, Aníbal Quijano, Djamila Ribeiro, Pamela Rosenkranz, Abel Rodríguez, Maria Belén Saéz de Ibarra, Barbara Santos, Paulo Tavares, Daiara Tukano, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro

352 pages, Paperback

Published April 1, 2022

About the author

Quinn Latimer is a California-born poet, critic, and editor whose work often explores feminist economies of writing, reading, and image production. Her books include Like a Woman: Essays, Readings, Poems (2017); Stories, Myths, Ironies, and Other Songs: Conceived, Directed, Edited, and Produced by M. Auder, coedited with Adam Szymczyk (2014); Sarah Lucas: Describe This Distance (2013); Film as a Form of Writing: Quinn Latimer Talks to Akram Zaatari (2013); and Rumored Animals (2012). Her writings and readings have been featured widely, including at REDCAT, Los Angeles; Chisenhale Gallery, London; Radio Athènes, Athens; the Poetry Project, New York; the Venice Architecture Biennale; and the Sharjah Biennial 13. Latimer was editor-in-chief of publications for documenta 14 in Athens and Kassel. She is currently faculty at Zürcher Hochschule der Künste, in Zurich, and, with Chus Martínez, runs a new feminist think tank at Institut Kunst, in Basel.